Deanna Roy

Six-Time USA Today Bestselling Author

May 12, 2008

Veggie Wars: A New Beginning

Deanna / Life with Kids / resolutions, veggie wars /

So, when we last visited the front line of the veggie wars, Mom was losing, big time. We’d discovered Elizabeth was hiding her veggies under a side table (and not thinking to go back and throw them out later.)

I didn’t blog about the veggie wars for a while because I was, well, despondent. Failing.

But I regrouped, and with some luck in the form of Luby’s veggie plates, we went through vegetable after vegetable to find something, anything, this child would eat.

Our next breakthrough was sweet potatoes, a favorite of Elizabeth’s when she was little, but somewhere around age 3, she lost her way. Around then, actually, we lost everything that wasn’t yellow–mac and cheese, bananas, apple sauce, and chicken nuggets were our only friends.

The trick to the sweet potatoes was to let her make them. We boiled the fresh sweet potatoes, peeled them, mashed them up, then added a little bit of butter and just a touch of brown sugar (literally a teaspoon per potato), and topped them with just a few marshmallows. Bake it for about 15 minutes, and yep, she’d eat it. With relish.

We’ve added french fries and mashed potatoes to our veggies as well, even though fries aren’t my favorite. She’ll also eat some whole kernel corn. We no longer offer carrots after discovering the stash of dried ones. Too easy to hide.

Elizabeth is six now and I never thought we’d be fighting this hard, this long. Emily is an excellent eater, adding a new food to her diet every few weeks. But we keep plugging at it, enduring the dinner time tears when necessary, breaking out the dessert bribes without guilt, and wishing Deceptively Delicious was just a tad more deceptive, as it hasn’t worked once on this little princess who may not be able to feel a pea under a mattress, but can spot a veggie at 20 paces.

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